Itching for patch 3.15 to hit live servers? Why not pass the time with a red post collection! Tonight's collection features a discussion on the upcoming changes to Rammus' W, CertainlyT with a thank you for Yasuo's PBE testers, an update on the Team builder - including the announcement of weekly PBE testing, info on the Snowdown 2013 icon crediting methods now testing on the PBE, and more!

On the 3.15 Change to Rammus W

Here's Socratocracy, a gameplay analyst, discussing the thought process behind the upcoming 3.15 change to Rammus' W - "Defensive Ball Curl -Can no longer be deactivated. Instead goes on cooldown when used (total cooldown of Defensive Ball Curl remains unchanged, as deactivating the ability previously did not reduce its cooldown)"

"Using Powerball will still bring you out of Defensive Ball Curl.

It is a common misconception that cancelling W would cause the ability to go on cooldown faster, when in fact the cooldown was the same in the background regardless of whether or not you left DBC early.

This change was intended to be a compensation buff to Rammus in turn for us reducing the duration of his taunt. It is a buff in that it reduces human error. I personally played Rammus quite a bit to get up to D1 last season, and in chaotic situations found myself accidentally deactivating W or never activating it in the first place believing I had (Rammus' engagement pattern is to Powerball into the target, taunt them, and then use W+R- W can't be activated while you're casting E). This led to frustrating scenarios where the Rammus player would think they had Ball Curl up when they didn't or vice-versa. Our hope with this is that it will make Rammus feel less frustrating to play as.

Admittedly, there are some cases where you might want to be able to manually deactivate it (trading off a Blue buff, using the increased armor to take down turrets faster but cancelling it if you were going to be auto-attacked), but since you can get out of it by using Q anyway, we believed the upside here to be a net positive for Rammus."

Thank You for Yasuo PBE Feedback

As Yasuo is preparing to launch on live, CertainlyT swung back by the PBE forums to drop off a thank you for all the feedback summoner's have provided during Yasuo's PBE testing.

"As I write this, Yasuo is about ready to launch on Live. In thinking about his late stage development, the PBE comes to mind at every juncture. I write to thank you, our diligent and communicative beta testing community members, for your feedback, recommendations and criticisms.

Your feedback has improved Yasuo’s mechanics and visuals dramatically -- improving his Sweeping Blade dash animation, changing his Flow bar color, altering the targeting paradigm of Steel Tempest's whirlwind cast, modifying his scaling across game time, touching up his hit effects, adjusting his cooldowns, and basic attack speed, and more. None of this was on our team’s radar prior to reading over your posts and analyses on these forums.

I especially appreciated your the clear statements about what you personally expected from Yasuo. We make this game for you. Never hesitate to demand that champions match or exceed your imagination’s desires. The simple act of articulating what you wanted from a Samurai champion was immensely helpful to the Yasuo team as we polished and refined him.

Additionally, your testing identified and gave clues to solving many bugs. We do a lot of internal QA prior to PBE release, but there is no way to catch everything without playing him thousands of times. This is where we rely on you to help us out. I am impressed by not just your ability to identify bugs, but to provide insightful context to help us reproduce them internally. For example, Yasuo could at one point cast his EQ combo but not end up dashing. It was awful when this happened, since you weren’t expecting it. Internally, we observed it in playtests, but could not reproduce it reliably. Several community members noticed that the problem always happened on purple side. Armed with this information, we quickly developed a stable internal reproduction of the bug and solved it.

So, from the entire Yasuo team, thank you for all your help. I hope you had as much fun as we did taking part in Yasuo’s creation. Please continue to think about Yasuo and maintain this conversation of how to make him the best champion we can – iteration doesn’t stop at release.

As for this thread, let’s discuss the Yasuo beta test itself - what went right and what could have been better - so that our future champions and features can make better use of their time on PBE.

-- Brad ‘CertainlyT’ Wenban"

Around the forums, he also answered a few last minute questions about Yasuo's kit:

"Yasuo is more focused on entering fights than exiting them. However, he does have tools to manage range. As Silver Grimalkin mentioned, his E can be used on minions (and low threat champions) to create distance. Additionally, the spell is a fixed distance dash. If you start near to your target, you will end up further from them than you started."

When asked how Yasuo's passive works with reducing the damage his crits do, CertainlyT commented:

"Most posters have explained it correectly. Calculate Yasuo's crit damage as if he didn't have the passive modifier. Then multiply that number by 0.9."

Team Builder Beta Update

missmechazero has posted an update on the Team Builder beta, including the announcement that the team will begin weekly PBE team builder testing starting tomorrow!

"Hi everyone!

Miss Mecha Zero here with a Team Builder Beta Update. We're coming back to the PBE tomorrow so I wanted to take some time to talk about what's been going on with our testing and iteration, and how you've helped us to make some improvements to the feature! Lyte and I will start a conversation thread here on the forums tomorrow so that you can send us your feedback and thoughts on the most recent iteration of Team Builder.

Team Builder Beta Update - December 12th, 2013

What is Team Builder?

Team Builder is a new queue designed to help League of Legends players create teams and strategize in a low-stress environment before getting into a game. In Team Builder, captains are able to create and control the composition of a team, while solo players can select their champion, role, and position before queuing up.

Testing on the PBE

For our initial testing, we were particularly interested in how well you were able to navigate the Team Builder interface since it's very different from the current Champ Select. We also wanted to get a sense for Team Builder queue times experienced by players on our test environment.

Although testers were able to build their teams easily, the transition from a Team Builder lobby to game start caught many players off guard. As soon as a match was found, Team Builder would minimize without warning and the game client would start. Many players reported that this experience felt too abrupt, especially since it was difficult to know how long matchmaking would take on the PBE.

In the next iteration, we won't have a complete “match made” ceremony where text and graphics display on the screen to that say a match has been found, but we have gone ahead and added a sound effect similar to the "Match found" effect from our live queues. We're hoping this change will make the experience more smooth.

We also noticed that, although queue times were relatively stable (unless a player was bugged out of the queue) there were exceptions that were a bit longer than we would prefer. When we enabled the ability for captains to specify roles for solo players, in addition to position, queue times increased more than expected. There are a couple reasons for this but the most significant is that the PBE is a much smaller region in terms of its player base, so the available pool of solos tends to be smaller. This problem was magnified last time we ran testing since many captains were also experimenting with unique team compositions as we had prompted with our UX testing instructions.

In order to evaluate this more specifically, we are inviting a much larger group of players to test on the environment the next time Team Builder will be enabled on the PBE. Also, we will be making the feature available for testing as often as we are able to (barring major issues). This way, we hope to observe more natural usage of the feature (closer to what we would expect to see on a live environment).

When will Team Builder be available again for Testing?

We will enable Team Builder on the PBE weekly starting Friday, Dec 13th and hope to have it available to you every week from Thursday through Sunday. Please note that we will strive to make it available as often as we can, but can only turn it on when there are enough players logged into the environment. More instructions and a comprehensive change list will be posted on the PBE community when we go live, and Lyte, RiotDoctahWayne and I will be here to discuss the feature. We are looking forward to discussing the feature with you again and getting more feedback!

To get involved with beta testing features like Team Builder, sign up using the web app for your region below! More regions will be added as support is implemented for them.

Snowdown Icon Crediting Method Now On PBE

"DISCLAIMER! Icons and rules may change based on region when this feature is live.

Help me find any issues with this system. I welcome both feedback and bugs. I hope this to run from now through the end of the event on the live servers. Direct your friends here. Also feel free to add me on the PBE and I may be able to respond there as well in certain circumstances.

Summoner Icon Rewards

How do I earn the summoner icon rewards?

There are five icons to earn during Snowdown:

Giftwrapped Poro: To earn the Giftwrapped Poro icon, you must win three matchmade games on Howling Abyss. Meaning, you must enter a queue (NOT a custom game), and win three games. For example, you can enter the Showdown queue or the ARAM queue, but you can’t create your own game on Howling Abyss and have it count towards your three wins.

Santa Gragas Cookie: You’ll earn this icon by sending any gift during Snowdown using the gifting (including Mystery Gifting) feature in the store.

Bad Gingerbread Veigar: To earn this icon, you must win a matchmade game as a premade team during the Snowdown event. For example, you’ll earn the icon if you and four friends queue up in Ranked 5s to do battle and emerge victorious, or if you queue up with a buddy and claim victory in a normal game. The key here is that the games must be matchmade against other players (so Co-op vs AI does not count).

Slay Belle Surprise: Wear a Snowdown skin during the event. Any former skin or any of the three new skins will work. Skins from other holidays, like Kitty Kat Katarina, would not.

Snow Teemo: When you unlock all four of the other icons, you’ll earn the Snow Teemo icon. Please be aware it may take up to three days after unlocking the fourth icon for Snow Teemo to show up.

When do I get the rewards?

The Snowdown summoner icons are added by script, so they may not be available on your account immediately after you unlock them. You should receive your icons no later than three days after the event ends. For the PBE please let me know if you do not receive them within 6 hours.

Tidbits from Xelnath

During one of Xelnath late night discussion threads, he mentioned a number of interesting tidbits!

When asked about extent of the rework work that will be done on Sion and Urgot, Xelnath commented:

"Sion/Urgot are big projects. I expect them to take longer than Xerath, just due to the complexity of the issues and the fact that they need a ton of love. I'll CC your comment to the guys looking at Lee Sin tho! :)"

"It's a serious project - expect it to filter out over time, rather than be a sudden surge in a single patch. That said, I know we're looking at several characters for the next few patches. "

When asked why he can't reveal anything about the work the team is looking to do on Zilean, Xelnath replied:

"There's a lot of negative side-effects to discussing champion changes too early - I saw this with Yorick. Ended up getting a lot of people's hopes up a little too early, especially when compared to the timeline for getting him done.

This was my fault though and no-one elses. :)

I suspect it's the same reason we're not ready to discuss other champions. Skarner, Xerath and Rengar reworks aren't out yet - and I suspect most people have no idea how much work a proper rework takes!"

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